Tomato Season

It’s finally tomato season! Mostly cherry tomatoes still, although we’ve harvested a few larger sauce tomatoes as well. With the cherries, I decided to pick a bunch before watering the garden last (to avoid having them all split), and trying to cook them quickly and can them as a half-cooked ‘sauce’ to use to make pasta in winter. My absolute favorite pasta dish is halved cherry tomatoes and basil on angel hair pasta, it would be fantastic to have that in winter… hence this experiment.

I started by cleaning, halving, and cooking down the cherry tomatoes. This is a mix of Sweet Million, Sungold, and Yellow Pear tomatoes. Then I added a Tablespoon of lemon juice to the pint jars, added the tomatoes, and processed for 35 minutes, per OSU’s Extension Service guidelines for ‘crushed’ tomatoes. They all sealed, so, fingers crossed for a few delicious winter meals!